Thank you for your reply.

That is split between tables and other objects. When I recreate the publication I will omit the non-table objects. Do you have any idea why it could be taking so long to drop the publication? I'm not familiar with the changes (if any) made to repliacted objects, or conversely those removed when the publication is dropped. Does in excess of two hours seem reasonable to you to drop a publication? The process I used to run sp_droppublication seems to be acquiring locks on large numbers of objects. Through observing the SQL running against the process in Activity Monitor, the process also seems to be dropping views in the replicated database. Does this sound like normal behaviour?

Once again, thanks for any help you can give me.